ation that they will be well, and
that not a pain or weakness shall be felt without tracing it immediately
to its real cause and applying the proper remedy at once; that health
shall be deemed a condition of happiness and its maintenance a religious
duty; that sickness shall be considered a sin and pain, a just
chastisement of God for it. When our young women are thus physically
trained, they will be prepared to bless the world as it never has been
blessed; they will usher in a period of moral and intellectual grandeur
such as the world has never witnessed; they will exert a strong
woman-influence in every sphere of thought and action which will be at
once refining, ennobling, and redeeming; they will so establish correct
habits of living, so sanctify the altars of home, so adorn the walks of
social life, that the very heart of the great body of society will throb
anew with fresh impulse of life and send out its currents of health and
strength to the remotest parts.

II. With such a physical preparation, we are ready for intellectual
action, for the education of mind.

Woman has not had a fair chance for the culture of her mind. She has
been continually anathematized and tormented with the idea that she is
the "weaker vessel." Her father, her brother, and her husband have
always told her that her mind was weak and small, and that it could not
comprehend great things nor do great works. Sometimes her mother and
sister are joined in this wholesale slander of the female mind. When a
little girl she has been paralyzed with the thought of her inferiority.
All through her youth it has been a dead weight on her mental activity.
Through her life it has ever muffled the harp of her heart and weighed
down the wings of her aspirations. It has been an incubus of
discouragement in all intellectual pursuits. How could woman be any
thing with the whole world against her? with even those she loved best,
and in whose judgment she most confided, all the time reminding her of
her mental weakness and inferiority? And as it has been, so it is. Woman
is still believed intellectually inferior to man, by ninety-nine one
hundredths of mankind. Poor, weak, silly, drunken, half-idiotic men,
whose wives have to support them, will tell you in conscious pride of
sex of woman's weakness of mind. I have heard little Lilliputian men,
whose minds were as small as a baby's rattle-box, always harping on this
worn-out string of woman's weakness of mind. I